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Why does Syria suddenly need its last practicing Jew? It needs America.
In what used to be Syria’s old Jewish quarter, Bakhour Chamntoub, a 76-year-old tennis-playing bachelor, lives as the last practicing Jew in Syria and the de facto leader of Syria’s six-person-strong Jewish community.
Life has changed for Chamntoub since the highly oppressive Assad Regime fell in December 2024. Under Assad, he and the rest of Syria’s remaining Jews kept a low profile. Now, Chamntoub has become something of a local celebrity.
The Palestinian children in his neighborhood routinely knock on his door asking for tennis balls. One Muslim resident of Damascus said he calls Chamntoub “uncle.” And these days, he regularly hosts reporters, tourists, and academics in his home – something he says would have been impossible under Assad. Members of the Israeli media now call him their “No. 1 Jew,” he said.
When he walks in the street, neighbors greet him warmly. “‘Shalom, boker tov, shabbat shalom,’ everybody says to me!” he shared gleefully during a video conversation from his patio in Damascus.
As Syria seeks sanctions relief, foreign investment, and international legitimacy after decades of dictatorship, outreach to Jews has become a way for the new government to signal its newfound tolerance to the West. And it seems to be working. This week, President Donald Trump announced plans to remove Syria from the State Department’s State Sponsors of Terrorism list for the first time since 1979.
But not everyone is on board. Several Syrian minority groups in the U.S. have been campaigning against lifting the remaining sanctions, fearing the government will persecute minorities once it secures Western support. Their concerns are not unwarranted: there have been several attacks on minority communities since the government’s rise to power, including some reportedly involving Syrian authorities.
A long history of decline
For years, Chamntoub has been the sole caretaker of Jewish life in Syria. He knows which Jewish families once lived in which homes, which of Syria’s 22 synagogues are still standing, and where generations of Syrian Jews are buried.
When a member of the community dies, Chamntoub is responsible for overseeing the burial process. Bodies of Jewish community members are taken to a Muslim burial office to be washed and prepared, before Chamntoub takes them to the Jewish cemetery. There, they are buried, though there are not enough Jews in the country to make a minyan, the minimum quorum of 10 Jewish men required by Jewish law to conduct communal religious services mandated for Jewish burials.
Syria’s Jewish community is among the oldest in the world, dating back more than 2,000 years. At its height, it numbered roughly 100,000 people, with communities concentrated in Aleppo and Damascus, but waves of persecution and political upheaval led to a mass exodus of Jews from Syria. Following the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, Jews faced deadly pogroms and restrictions on emigration under successive Syrian governments. Many who attempted to leave the country were imprisoned, tortured or killed.
In 1992, when then-Syrian leader Hafez al-Assad finally permitted Syrian Jews to emigrate, thousands left en masse for Brooklyn, New Jersey, Israel and Mexico.
Chamntoub, who was born in 1950, witnessed almost every chapter of the community’s decline. He also lived through the reign of Hafez al-Assad’s son, Bashar al-Assad, a brutal leader who used chemical weapons on his own people to suppress dissent, and oversaw a 14-year-long civil war that resulted in the death of 400,000 Syrians.
In December 2024, Chamntoub found himself in the center of a new chapter of Syrian Jewish history after opposition forces toppled the Assad regime. Leading the charge was Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former Al-Qaeda member who is now the self-appointed leader of the new Syrian government and trying to prove his days of terrorism are behind him. He dons a suit and goes by his birth name rather than the pseudonym he used during his time in al-Qaeda, al-Jolani. He speaks of making peace with his neighbors (Israel among them), and has expressed interest in bringing exiled Jews back to Syria.
This fall, al-Sharaa met with a group of Syrian American Jews in New York – though they avoided the topic of Israel. He has even appointed a designated official within the government whose job it is to engage with Syrian Jews in the diaspora.
Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, said the strategy is not new. During the Assad era, Syria’s ambassador to the United States in the early 2000s, Imad Moustapha, cultivated relationships with Syrian Jews in Brooklyn, attending bar mitzvahs and community events in hopes of easing Syria’s isolation.
“The charm campaign by Ahmed al-Sharaa, Syria’s new president, is clearly a continuation of the same strategy,” Landis said.
Indeed, most U.S. sanctions on Syria were lifted in May of 2025, due in part to lobbying in Washington by an American Syrian Jewish organization called the Jewish Heritage in Syria Foundation. Its leader Henry Hamra, the nephew of Syria’s last chief rabbi, has been the face of efforts to involve the Jewish diaspora in conversation about Syria’s future.
Through it all, Chamntoub never seriously considered leaving Syria, even as family members emigrated to the U.S. and Israel. He says he never felt like an outsider in the country. He enjoys living in his parents’ home among fruit trees and birds whose songs often drowned out the virtual conversation from his patio. He also enjoys his girlfriends in Syria, whom he says he can’t bear to leave.
He cleans his home for Shabbat every Friday, and prepares a meal to commemorate each Jewish holiday, though he says it is hard to get in the holiday spirit alone.
He also keeps kosher, a Herculean task in Syria. For years, Chamntoub ate a vegetarian diet, relying on a rabbi in Turkey to smuggle him kosher meat from time to time. Then, in 2018, he met a 24-year-old Syrian Jew living in Brooklyn named Joe Jajati.
Jajati was born in Syria and left the country at age 2. His grandfather was the head representative of the Jewish community in Syria and, according to Jajati, met frequently with then-President Assad.
Jajati always hoped to visit his birth country, and decided to make the trip after learning there was a Jewish man who remained there.
“I just wanted to meet him. I wanted to hear what he had to say,” Jajati told me.
The two met in Damascus and connected instantly. “After that, we became like best friends,” said Jajati, who has returned several times over the years, always with a suitcase full of kosher meat for Chamntoub.
After the Assad regime fell, Jajati felt the moment was ripe to change the way Syrians think of Jews, and the way Israelis and Americans view Syria.
‘We don’t represent the radical point of view’
Alongside Chamntoub, Jajati started the Syrian Mosaic Foundation, an organization that hopes to revive Jewish life in Syria and promote a more pluralistic future for the country. Chamntoub heads its Syria branch, working alongside Muslim and Christian staff, including Palestinians.
One of the foundation’s main initiatives is bringing delegations of Jews to Syria under armed government escort. The delegations are intended to foster relationships that were impossible under Assad.
Participants often include reporters and academics, among them David Horovitz, the editor-in-chief of The Times of Israel, and Dr. Susanna Heschel, the head of Jewish studies at Dartmouth.
After visiting the University of Damascus, Heschel brought a Syrian exchange student she met there to Dartmouth. She hopes he will be the first of many.
“I want to expose these young [Syrians] to Judaism, Jewish history, Zionism,” she said. “They don’t know anything. How could they? Nobody’s teaching that at the university.”
Jajati says the reason the new Syrian government supports this work is clear. “They want to show, not just the Jews, but the world that, ‘Look, we’re good now, we’re not what people think we are.’”
When the delegations come, they often stay at the Inana Hotel, a complex of homes that once belonged to Joe Jajati’s family. It sat empty for years until it was purchased and turned into a hotel by a Muslim family – a common fate for the property of Jews who fled Syria.
Maysara Al-Zoubi, a Mosaic staff member whose family owns the hotel, said he joined the organization in hopes of helping attract Western investment to Syria.
“You have to give investors a good example that we don’t represent the radical point of view,” he said. “We wanted to wash the image of the radical society, and to give another good image to bring these investors to the country.”
Critical to that, he said through a translator, is the work the Mosaic Foundation is doing to bring Jews back into the fabric of Syrian society.
In March, the organization restored its first synagogue, the El Frenj synagogue in Damascus. Last month, a group worked to clean up the tombstone of Rabbi Nissim Indib, the former head Rabbi of Syria. Indib is best known for having recited the Shema prayer with Israeli spy Eli Cohen before his execution.
With the help of Syria’s new police chief, Mosaic also managed to gain possession of several Jewish artifacts that were stolen and put on the black market in the midst of the chaotic fall of the Assad regime.
And this week, the organization began work to renovate Syria’s main Jewish cemetery.
‘They didn’t have exposure to Jews’
Jajati and Chamntoub also hope to impress upon Syrians a different view of Jews than was forced upon citizens under Assad.
“These people were closed off to the whole world the past few years,” Jajati told me. “They really didn’t have exposure to Jews under the Assad regime.”
Since the new government took power, the economic situation for most Syrians has worsened, with 90% of Syrians living in poverty. During Ramadan, Mosaic distributed hundreds of kilos of meat to non-Jewish residents from Chamntoub’s home in Damascus and at a mosque in Quneitra, the province bordering Israel that has seen repeated Israeli incursions since the Assad regime fell.
Mirna al-Rached, a Christian resident from Damascus, trekked to Chamntoub’s home for assistance.
“Bakhour put the meat neatly and gently in the bag, giving with a very nice smile on his face,” she recalled.
“It breaks the monotonous narrative that we always hear about the Jewish people,” she added. “You don’t know anything about them, except what you hear from the news, you know, the whole image about the Jewish people, about their racism, about wars, all the negative things.”
In April, after a Jewish person was reportedly threatened by a Hezbollah actor in Damascus, Mosaic installed solar-powered lights and cameras in the old Jewish Quarter as a security measure. But Jajati knows the move will benefit non-Jews living in the neighborhood as well. Years of economic collapse and electricity shortages have left many Damascus streets pitch black at night.
Now, the company that installed the lights and cameras for that project has committed to helping the organization rebuild synagogues in Syria.
“That would be the first time someone contributes with us, and it’s a Muslim Syrian company,” said Jajati, who has thus far funded Mosaic’s initiatives himself.
But many in the Syrian Jewish diaspora in the U.S. are skeptical of the engagement.
Mourdi, a member of the Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn said he remains deeply suspicious of the new government. He asked to be identified only by his first name in case he ever pursues a property claim in Syria.
Mourdi left Syria at 24 and said his family’s home and store, like those of many Syrian Jews, were transferred through fraudulent court proceedings after they fled the country. He believes the only way for the new government to earn the community’s trust is by voiding those transactions and restoring confiscated property.
“They want to show the world that they are close to the Jews, that they want them to come back, but nobody’s gonna come back,” he said.
“You want the Jews back? Make an executive order: Any Jewish property that was sold through the court is unacceptable. And after that, I’m gonna show you, 80% of our community is gonna go back to get their property,” he said.
He pointed to an episode after al-Sharaa took power in December 2024, when the new president reportedly reclaimed his own family’s former home, which had been occupied by another family under the Assad regime.
“This is my family’s house, and we have many memories here, so we’d like it back now,” al-Sharaa reportedly told the occupants before they vacated.
Mourdi said he raised the issue of property restitution with American advocates working with the new government, but never received a response.
“For us, Syria is like somebody who died,” he said. “If you try to wake him up, it’s not gonna work. But some people think, ‘No, we can bring him back.’”
Chamntoub also has reservations. While he welcomes the fact that Jews can once again visit Syria, he worries the government’s outreach will end there.
Jewish property has been seized by the state, he said. And while he is grateful for the greater freedom to express his religion and opinions publicly, he fears the government has little interest in hearing them. He briefly considered running for a seat in Syria’s legislature but ultimately decided it would be pointless.
“If I can’t express my opinions frankly… I’m not interested in being in the assembly,” he said.
Though Chamntoub has become the public face of Syria’s tiny Jewish community, the Syrian government has yet to recognize him in any official capacity.
“Everyone in the world considers me the leader of Syria’s Jewish community,” he added, “except the Syrian government.”
Neither Chamntoub nor Jajati have any delusions that they will manage to bring the Jewish community back to Syria. While Jajati says many American Syrian Jews have told him they’re interested in visiting the country, no one has plans to settle there.
“There’s no Syrian, forget about Jews, there’s no Syrian that is living in America wants to go back to live in Syria,” said Jajati.
“My dream is that it becomes like the Emirates, like Dubai,” he added. “The reality is, I hope it doesn’t become another Libya. All Syrians have to do their part so that we don’t let it get there.”
Chamntoub answered instantly when asked if he thinks the six Jews remaining in Syria will be the last: “For sure.”
After a heavy silence, he burst into laughter and cracked a joke to his translator that he might need to marry all of his girlfriends to change that.
The translator explained: “He said he will have to marry like 10 women at the same time!”
The post Why does Syria suddenly need its last practicing Jew? It needs America. appeared first on The Forward.
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Are you there Hashem? It’s me, Clara
“I can complain no more of what brutal tongue-abuse I suffered today. I have exhausted all manners of expression for my grievances.”
I wish I could tell you I don’t recognize those words. I wish I could say they were written by a beleaguered 19th-century governess, or a soldier in the Continental Army afflicted with gangrene. Unfortunately, they were written by me. The day was May 20, 2016. I was 12 years old and full of spite.
I am not sure what, exactly, provoked me that day (since I had exhausted all manners of expression for my grievances), but judging from other angry rants found in this deceptively cute, panda-covered journal, it probably had something to do with: A) My obsession with school, B) My enemies, let’s call them Kyle and Reese, C) My parents’ attempts to discipline me, and D) My conviction that the whole world was conspiring against me. These were heavy burdens for a sixth-grader to bear. Fortunately, the school year was almost over. Reform Jewish summer camp was just around the bend, and I was praying for change. Literally.
“God, if you can hear me, please let me have an amazing camp-experience,” I wrote a few weeks before the session started. “It’s my only escape.” Also, while I had His ear, could He make sure I got a really good part (preferably Belle) in the summer musical, Beauty and the Beast? The previous year, in Aladdin, I’d been relegated to some sadsack ensemble role that clearly did not make use of my incalculable dramatic potential. Please, Hashem!!
But God had His work cut out for Him.
During my first summer, I had established a reputation for myself as a puritanical hardass thanks to my clashes with the popular girls of Bunk 15. Let’s call them Samantha, Madison and Lindsey. Lindsey slept in the bunk bed next to mine, and every night she would amuse the other girls by pretending that she was singing Taylor Swift hits in her sleep. This enraged me. I hung up towels around my bed so I could silent-scream in private. Soon, the trio began to whisper that I was “gossiping” about them. I don’t think the counselors bought that story, though, since successful gossiping requires you to spread lies to many people, and I knew around three. I spent seven weeks in non-stop kvetch mode, writing pathos-ridden letters home, crying a lot, and making petty demands on God in a prior journal that I am scared to open. It got so bad that the camp director had to call up my parents on vacation.
Yet when the long-awaited last day came and my parents loaded up the car with all my musty-smelling camp stuff to take me home, something inexplicable happened: On my first night back in my own bed, I cried that I missed camp. Maybe I had been wrong all along! Send me back!
I don’t know how I got sucked back into another year. Maybe I’d been hoodwinked by ritual — the s’mores, the songs, the tie-dyed shirts, the crying around the lake as we promised to come back — or the fantasy that next year, I would finally be accepted. In any case, nostalgia had caused me to keep secrets from myself. “When does the memory keep secrets?” the Italian writer Alda Merini asks cryptically in her 1989 book Delirio amoroso, or Amorous Delirium, a collection of poems inspired by her experiences with love-induced madness. “When it forgets.”
I had forgotten, and now I was going to pay the price.
On my first day back, I arrived to find that all my complaining to the camp director had backfired: I’d earned an exile worthy of Napoleon, except instead of Elba, I was going to Bunk 20, where I knew nobody. I had no foes, and also no friends.
According to 12-year-old me, I spent the next seven weeks fighting back an unstoppable tide of hostilities. In reality, I probably spent just as much time swimming, kayaking, trying to play volleyball, hanging out with my new friends Lana, Hannah and Sabrina, painting clay pots, and pretending I wasn’t spending Shabbat services writing installments of a bleak tale called “Gertrude’s Life,” about a long-suffering Victorian girl with a mangled left leg. But 12-year-old me was fluent exclusively in “kvetch.” A couple of times a week, a cadre of rabbis with guitars tried to counteract my natural crankiness by teaching us key principles of Reform Jewish wisdom: Shalom (keeping calm), Tikkun Olam (repairing the world), and Hineini (present awareness). Unfortunately for the rabbis, I was too far gone. I had braces on my teeth and eczema on my skin, an intimidating combination of blood and steel.
You probably won’t be shocked to learn that I didn’t get Belle. Instead I got cast as something more fitting, the wicked crone who turns the Prince into the Beast to begin with. It seemed unfair to me that such an important catalyst didn’t have any lines, just menacing gestures. Later in the summer, our bunk went on a camping trip where I broke a glow-stick on myself and my sleeping mat, and I became convinced that I was going to die. I briefly developed “enamorous feelings” for a young fellow before concluding that “he was really into cursing and being a general idiot.” On the bus back from some field trip, a kid named J.T. said he wanted to kiss me, which was repugnant and secretly flattering.
And of course, I somehow still managed to scrap with my tormenters from the year before. On a visit to Bunk 18, the lair of my enemies and also a few friends, Madison told the counselors that she felt “uncomfortable” changing out of her swimsuit in front of me. For my part, I felt uncomfortable that she was framing me as a pervert.
Looking back on this journal, I may have had myself to blame for the isolation I spent so much time complaining about. How would anyone make friends with a 12-year-old nudnik who wrote things like “I had to go to the compost bin thrice during breakfast” and “I started off the morning by crying the equivalent of Taghaza, the city made of salt”? Even Job would not have had the patience.
One way or another, by summer’s end, I was ready to leave camp forever. Or so I claimed. “At the moment, our bunk is creating a plaque to commemorate the summer. Everyone’s laughing, sharing inside jokes I’ll never be a part of,” I wrote. “To be honest, I’m rather sick of this camp thing and going home in two days is perfectly fine with me. Camp days are too frivolous. I need something with which to occupy the mind.”
But if I wanted “something with which to occupy the mind,” I was about to get it. Two days later, I was back home. Camp was no longer tormenting me with its frivolity, and I missed it. Memory had worked its hazy rearview magic on my mind once again. I thought about my friends, about singing the evening prayer and swaying back and forth, about the wooden float we’d burned in the middle of the pond like a Viking ship to commemorate the summer. I thought about ice cream sandwiches. “It’s been so fun, and now it seems like it had all been a dream,” I wrote.
A day or so later, missing camp had become a dream, too. I never went back.
It’s been ten years since I was twelve. That time of life is increasingly dream-like. When I reread the cursed document that is my camp journal, I feel the misery. I feel it churn in my stomach sure as suspicious falafel. Yet in photos taken at camp, I see myself smiling, entwined with other girls, my braces glinting in the sun. I cannot tell which person is real. Both girls — the one in the journal and the one in the pictures — seem unknowable.
I don’t know if I’ll ever figure out what I really thought. Memory is made of such blobby, malleable stuff that you can’t touch it without changing it, reshaping it in some way. And since memories make up our “sense of self,” whatever that is, this must mean that we are constantly morphing, too.
The last thing I wrote about camp at the summer’s end was that it seemed like another life, “as if it had all happened to someone else.”
Maybe it did.
The post Are you there Hashem? It’s me, Clara appeared first on The Forward.
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Cornell condemns student’s viral antisemitic remarks, but won’t bar him from campus
(JTA) — Cornell University is condemning viral antisemitic remarks made by an undergraduate student who appeared on “Piers Morgan Uncensored” earlier this week, but the school’s president says no further action is planned against the student.
During his appearance, the student, Austin Franco, defended his statement in June that he did not want to work with Jews, saying that he did not like most of the Jews he had met. The remark was made in a private message that the company that received it publicized.
“As a university built on the solid foundations of our nation’s democratic freedoms, Cornell has an obligation to fiercely defend freedom of speech — even when we find that speech abhorrent,” Cornell’s president, Michael Kotlikoff, said in a statement issued late Wednesday, shortly after the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reached out to the school for comment on Franco.
“The student’s public comments invoked hateful generalizations and uninformed tropes with a long, ugly history of harm,” Kotlikoff said, adding that “antisemitism generally” is “detestable, ignorant, and fully at odds with the values of the Cornell community.”
Kotlikoff, who is Jewish, did not mention Franco by name in his statement, citing federal privacy law, nor did he specify which of Franco’s comments about Jews the school found objectionable.
His comments once again place Cornell on the front line in tensions over antisemitism at colleges and universities. The school reached a $60 million settlement with the Trump administration last year to resolve antisemitism claims and regain $250 million in funding that had been frozen over campus unrest in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
Cornell was one of the earliest schools to face antisemitism allegations after Oct. 7, 2023, when a professor spoke at a pro-Palestinian rally and said he had been “exhilarated” by the Hamas-led attack against southern Israel, in which more than 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage.
But the latest incident involving Franco had little to do with the subsequent war in Gaza until Tuesday, when the student told Morgan on his YouTube show that he objected to Jews in part because of Israel, which he deemed “a genocidal country.”
The controversy over Franco, a rising junior at the Ivy League university in Ithaca, New York, began in June when he wrote in an internship application that he was “not interested in working for a jew.”
His name and remarks were publicized by the Jewish co-owners of Handshake, the tech company to which Franco had applied for an internship, though Franco has claimed he’d already turned down an offer. His comments prompted online backlash — including from Leo Terrell, the Trump administration’s antisemitism czar, who posted dozens of times about the 19-year-old.
Franco has garnered significant support from the far right, including through a crowdfunding campaign initiated by a YouTuber who had previously drawn criticism for saying he hoped to see “another Hitler.” Franco’s comments to Morgan included positive references to “America First,” the Trump-led nativist movement embraced by the far right.
Cornell had announced it was opening an investigation into Franco when his comments were first publicized. He remained in the headlines after he was secretly filmed by an apparent sting operation led by Accuracy in Media, a right-wing activist group that has targeted pro-Palestinian students and university heads the group deems antisemitic on other campuses. Franco told a hidden camera interviewer connected to the group last week that the university’s investigation had amounted to little and that he would be returning to Cornell.
Asked by Morgan Tuesday to explain his beliefs, Franco said that a Jewish friend of his at Virginia Tech University, where he was enrolled before transferring to Cornell, “said we should genocide all Palestinians.” He named other “bad experiences with Jews” he claimed to have experienced in college, focusing on Jewish campus figures he said had “made things up about me,” and said Jews had “made my life a living hell.”
As Morgan pushed Franco to admit he was antisemitic, the student insisted he was not.
“Not wanting to be around Jewish people does not mean you don’t like them,” he said, adding that one of his exes “was half-Jewish.” He returned to Israel later in the conversation, chargingthat it is a Jewish-led “genocidal country” that insists upon “killing Palestinians and reporters and dragging America into wars abroad.” He concluded, “No, I am not going to want to associate with those people.”
“This is a common sentiment that is held,” Franco said. “If you think this is just me, you are completely wrong.”
Morgan, for his part, concluded, “You kind of made yourself unemployable.”
Franco is facing more immediate consequences, he announced on X on Wednesday. “My parents are kicking me out,” he tweeted, drawing offers of support from a handful of prominent far-right personalities.
Like many other schools that faced unrest after Oct. 7, Cornell has taken steps aimed at countering campus antisemitism while attempting to balance academic freedom concerns, in part as a result of its settlement with the Trump administration. The university commissioned an antisemitism task force and has undertaken several initiatives, including new campus climate surveys and stricter Title VI enforcement. It has also enforced a range of disciplinary actions against pro-Palestinian students.
But when it comes to Franco, one Jewish faculty member at Cornell theorized, the administration’s hands were tied.
“You sort of have to live with it,” Menachem Rosensaft, a visiting professor at Cornell Law School and former general counsel for the World Jewish Congress, told JTA. “He is engaging in obnoxious thought that is not harming anyone else.”
Rosensaft has been at the center of other antisemitism-related controversies at Cornell, including in 2024, when he prompted Kotlikoff to criticize another Jewish professor’s planned class on Gaza — an action that the school’s faculty union said was a violation of academic freedom.
In the case of Franco, Rosensaft argued that Cornell shouldn’t “turn him into a First Amendment martyr.”
But Rosensaft added that there could be grounds for discipline if Franco returned to campus and made harmful comments about Jews in the classroom or in other public spaces.
In 2025, Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, praised Kotlikoff for what he called “a comprehensive approach to countering antisemitism.” An ADL spokesperson did not return a JTA request for comment on Cornell’s latest statement about Franco.
Franco himself has launched a second crowdfunding campaign to support his housing costs.
“I have reiterated that my parents do not share my views, and it seems they no longer wish to provide me with a home to live in,” he wrote in the description. “I know the road ahead will be difficult, but this is the path I chose. I could have lived a more conventional life, as my parents did, and perhaps in a different time I would have. However, that is not the world we live in today, and because of that, I chose a different path than most.”
This story has been corrected to reflect that the original comments Austin Franco made about not wanting to work with Jews were made in a private message rather than publicly.
The post Cornell condemns student’s viral antisemitic remarks, but won’t bar him from campus appeared first on The Forward.
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Netanyahu showcases diplomatic victories that have expiration dates
(JTA) — A rejuvenated Benjamin Netanyahu returned home to Israel Thursday from Washington, having crossed off everything on his diplomatic shopping list.
Grinning photo op with U.S. President Donald Trump? Check. Iran still a top priotiry? Check. Conciliation with U.S. Vice President JD Vance and conflict with New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani? Check and check. Meetings with top-level senators and with salt-of-the-earth pro-Israel Americans? Check, check and Check!
Had he checked his pen, however, Netanyahu might have found that the ink was running out. To the degree that the Israeli prime minister scored public relations victories during his visit to the U.S. this week, they all have impending expiration dates.
Netanyahu, who faces a tough reelection campaign for the elections to be held on Oct. 27, needs to show the Israeli voters that his claimed superpower, influencing Americans to support the Jewish state, is still potent. His rivals are already making the case that his power is spent.
“Netanyahu’s expectation and hope is that Trump will establish, figuratively speaking, a re-elect Benjamin Netanyahu headquarters in Washington for the next three months,” said Aaron David Miller, a veteran Middle East negotiator under Republican and Democratic administrations who is now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The prime minister seemed genuinely elated on Tuesday after he and the U.S. president met at the White House. Contrary to reports ahead of the meeting, Netanyahu said he was not seeking to pull the United States back into an all-out war. Instead, he wanted to see eye-to-eye with Trump on what happens if the talks to end the war fail.
He told ABC News in an interview he was in lock-step with Trump over the three options ahead: “One, to indeed succeed making a deal; two, to continue a blockade; three, to take military action,” Netanyahu said. “Anything that will produce the end of Iran’s nuclear program is what we want. That’s our common goal. We talked about it.”
The problem for Netanyahu is that the deal Trump seeks is anything but satisfying to Israel: The Memorandum of Understanding Vance reached in June, just weeks before the war resumed, allows Iran a stake in controlling – and even profiting from – the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway through which one-fifth of the world’s petroleum transits, a prerogative the Islamic Republic never before enjoyed.
Privately, Israeli officials have said they don’t expect the deal to happen, and that Trump will eventually turn to options two and three, which the Israelis favor. But Trump’s popularity is cratering ahead of critical midterm elections, inflation is not abating and even as Iran takes shots at ships in the Strait of Hormuz and its U.S.-allied neighbors, Trump keeps banking on a deal.
“There are very friendly negotiations going on,” he said Monday, the day Netanyahu arrived. “I think there’s a good chance that something could happen.”
But diplomacy wasn’t the only concern during Netanyahu’s visit. Domestic politics dogged Netanyahu in the U.S. capital. Opposition leader Yair Lapid was also in town. Both were ostensibly there for the funeral of South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, a pro-Israel stalwart who backed the Iran war. Lapid in a talk to The Atlantic Council took shots at Netanyahu’s public diplomacy, saying his attacks on Democrats who were critical of Israel were making the country more isolated.
Press releases from Netanyahu’s office sought to reinforce his status as the explainer in chief: He met with prominent senators, he met with Cabinet officials, he met, above all, with Trump.
Yet these releases undercut any claim Netanyahu might have had to the prominence he once enjoyed in the American mind.
The single Democratic senator he met with was John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, whose robust support for Israel makes him an outlier in his party – something Fetterman repeatedly emphasized in the chat Netanyahu’s office posted. “It’s been disappointing as a Democratic politician, how our party continues to behave,” Fetterman said.
Lapid, by contrast, posed for a photo with Democratic senators, including some who have recently criticized Israel stridently, like Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia. “Boycotting those who oppose you is not the way,” Lapid said on X. ”Repair relations with both parties. It’s not always fun, but that’s what it takes. Not by whining and not by boycotts.”
Netanyahu’s failure to engage with the American left also was evident in video of his meeting with evangelicals. “I’m very grateful to you for your consistent support, for the constancy of your friendship, and now it’s time to fight, fight, fight,” he said, evoking Trump’s famous call when he escaped an assassin’s bullet in 2024.
That prompted Mike Evans, an author who is an outlier among evangelicals for his stridency in advocating for extreme right positions, to lash out at the left using apocalyptic language. “We are fighting right now against the dark side, the leftist, godless dark side, but by the grace of God, we’re going to win this battle,” he said.
Netanyahu also took on Mamdani, who has called for Netanyahu’s arrest, likening his administration of the city to the Nazi era in an interview on Fox News. Mamdani’s wish was never going to come through – he ultimately acknowledged he had no power to arrest Netanyahu – yet his sentiment had staying power: A poll showed 49% of Americans agree that Netanyahu should be arrested.
Linsey Davis, the ABC reporter who interviewed Netanyahu, pressed him on Israel’s plummeting popularity. Netanyahu blamed the rise of social media and said it concerned him – but notably he did not explain how he planned to counter what he described as a propaganda threat to American and Israeli interests.
“I think there’s been a change because of the proliferation of social media and the fact that sovereign countries have manipulated bot farms and other things, and we can see a direct relationship between the proliferation of the social media and the decline in support for Israel,” he said. “Does it concern me? Yes, yes it does. And I want bipartisan support for Israel because I think that’s the fundament of our national security.”
Netanyahu could point to one seeming public diplomacy success: He met with Vance, likely to be a frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination in 2028, and the vanguard of the sector of the GOP that is growing disaffected with Israel. A U.S. official told Axios the meeting was “cordial and productive,” diplomatese for not warm.
As for the flurry of photo-ops the prime minister’s office sent out from the trip, the one on one with Vance was not among them.
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